Question

how should we behave to our rivals

Answer 1

As an undergraduate, at my school it was practically a requirement to steal silverware from the campus cafeteria. There were students who'd commandeered full sets of china. The desk clerk at my dorm used to say that the only thing we were learning from our college education was "how to steal."

Somehow it didn't seem wrong to us to steal from the cafeteria (though I drew the line at a single setting of silverware). Plus, we'd heard that at other schools, students used the cafeteria trays as sleds after the first winter snow. At least we weren't doing that (though arguably this was only because there are no hills in Chicago).

Clearly this "tradition" of petty theft was something we learned from our classmates -- but what exactly led us to believe that our unethical behavior was "okay"? It could be that since we saw no one getting caught or punished, we decided we wouldn't either. Or perhaps because the behavior was so widespread we never considered that it might be wrong. Or maybe our own sense of morality was modified by what we saw our friends doing.

A team led by Francesca Gino devised a clever study to test some of these explanations for unethical behavior by groups. They recruited 141 undergraduates from Carnegie Mellon University to participate in a study ostensibly about math skills. The students entered a testing room in groups of 8 to 14. They were given a set of 20 problems and told they had just five minutes to complete them -- an impossibly short period given the difficulty of the problems. They were also given an envelope with $10 inside. After the five minutes were over, the students were told to self-grade the test and pay themselves 50 cents for each correct response, depositing the change in a cardboard box for the purpose. All except one group of students put their answers in a paper shredder, so the experimenters would never know if they had cheated. The other group served as a control, and their questions were carefull